Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (21 page)

G
eorge Ronkers was a young urologist in a university town — a lucrative situation nowadays; the uninformed liberality of both the young and old college community produced a marvel of venereal variety. A urologist had plenty to do. Ronkers was affectionately nicknamed by a plethora of his clientele at Student Health. “Raunchy Ronk,” they said. With deeper affection, his wife called him “Raunch.”

Her name was Kit; she had a good sense of humor about George's work and a gift for imaginative shelter. She was a graduate student in the School of Architecture; she had a teaching assistantship, and she taught one course to undergraduate architecture students called “Interior Space.”

It was her field, really. She was completely responsible for all the interior space in the Ronkers home. She had knocked down walls, sunk bathtubs, arched doorways, rounded rooms, ovaled windows; in short, she treated interior space as an illusion. “The trick,” she would say, “is not letting you see where one room ends and another begins; the concept of a
room
is defeating to the concept of
space;
you can't make out the boundaries. …” And so on; it was her field.

George Ronkers walked through his house as if it were a park in a foreign but intriguing city. Theories of space didn't bother him one way or another.

“Saw a girl today with seventy-five warts,” he'd say. “Really an obvious surgery. Don't know why she came to
me.
Really should have seen a
gynecologist
first.”

The only part of the property that Ronkers considered
his
field was the large, lovely black walnut tree beside the house. Kit had spotted the house first; it belonged to an old Austrian named Kesler whose wife had just died. Kit told Ronkers it was repairable inside because the ceilings were at least high enough. But Ronkers had been sold on account of the tree. It was a split-trunked black walnut, growing out of the ground like two trees, making a high, slim V. The proper black walnut has a tall, graceful, upshooting style — the branches and the leaves start about two stories off the ground, and the leaves are small, slender, and arranged very closely together; they are a delicate green, turning yellow in October. The walnuts grow in a tough, rubbery pale-green skin; in the fall they reach the size of peaches; the skins begin to darken — even blackening in spots — and they start to drop. Squirrels like them.

Kit liked the tree well enough, but she was ecstatic telling old Herr Kesler what she was going to do with his house after he moved out. Kesler just stared at her, saying occasionally, “Which wall?
That
wall? You're going
this
wall to down-take, yes? Oh, the
other
wall too? Oh. Well… what will the ceiling up-hold? Oh…”

And Ronkers told Kesler how
much
he liked the black walnut tree. That was when Kesler warned him about their neighbor.

“Der Bardlong”
  Kesler said. “He wants the tree down-chopped but I never to him listened.” George Ronkers tried to press old Kesler to explain the motives of his would-be neighbor Bardlong, but the Austrian suddenly thumped the wall next to him with the flat of his hand and cried to Kit, “Not
this
wall too, I hope not! Ah, this wall I always
enjoyed
have!”

Well, they had to be delicate. No more plans out loud until Kesler moved out. He moved to an apartment in another suburb; for some reason, he dressed for the occasion. Like a Tyrolean peasant, his felt Alpine hat with a feather in it and his old white knees winking under his lederhosen, he stood in a soft spring rain by his ancient wooden trunks and let George and Kit hustle the furniture around for him.

“Won't you get out of the rain, Mr. Kesler?” Kit asked him, but he would not budge from the sidewalk in front of his former house until all his furniture was in the truck. He was watching the black walnut tree.

Herr Kesler put his hand frankly on Kit's behind, saying to her, “Do not let
der pest Bardlong
the tree down-chop, okay?”

“Okay,” said Kit.

George Ronkers liked to lie in bed in the spring mornings and watch the sun filter through the new green leaves of his black walnut tree. The patterns the tree cast on the bed were almost mosaic. Kit had enlarged the window to accommodate more of the tree; her term for it was “inviting the tree in.”

“Oh, Raunch,” she whispered, “isn't it lovely?”

“It's a lovely tree.”

“Well, I mean the
room
too. And the window, the elevated sleeping platform…”

“Platform?
I thought it was a bed.”

There was a squirrel who came along a branch very near the window — in fact, it often brushed the screen with its tail; the squirrel liked to tug at the new nuts, as if it could anticipate autumn.

“Raunch?”

“Yup …”

“Remember the girl with seventy-five warts?”
“Remember
her!”

“Well, Raunch …
where
were the warts?”

And
der pest Bardlong
gave them no trouble. All that spring and hot summer, when workmen were removing walls and sculpting windows, the aloof Mr. and Mrs. Bardlong smiled at the confusion from their immaculate grounds, waved distantly from their terraces, made sudden appearances from behind a trellis — but always they were neighborly, encouraging of the youthful bustle, prying into nothing.

Bardlong was retired. He was
the
Bardlong, if you're at all familiar with the shock-absorber and brake-systems magnate. In the Midwest, you maybe have seen the big trucks.

Even in retirement, Bardlong appeared to be absorbing whatever shock his new neighbors and their renovations might have caused him. His own house was an old red-brick mansion, trimmed tastefully with dark green shutters and overcrawling with ivy. It imitated a Georgian version of architecture; the front of the house was square and centered with tall, thin downstairs windows. The depth of the house was considerable; it went back a long way, branching into terraces, trellises, rock gardens, manicured hedges, fussed-over flower beds, and a lawn as fine as a putting green.

The house took up a full corner of the shady, suburban street. Its only neighbor was the Ronkerses' house, and the Bardlongs' property was walled off from George and Kit by a low slate-stone wall. From their second-floor windows, George and Kit looked down into the Bardlongs' perfect yard; their tangle of bushes and unkempt, matted grass was a full five feet above the apparent dike that kept their whole mess from crushing Bardlong as he raked and pruned. The houses themselves were queerly close together, the Ronkerses' having once been servant quarters to the Bardlongs', long before the property was divided.

Between them, rooted on the raised ground on the Ronkerses' side of the slate-stone wall, was the black walnut tree. Ronkers could not imagine whatever had prodded old Herr Kesler to think that Bard-long wanted the demise of the tree. Perhaps it had been a language problem. The tree must have been a shared joy to Bardlong. It shaded
his
windows, too; its stately height towered over his roof. One veer of the V angled over George and Kit; the other part of the V leaned over Bardlong.

Did the man not care for unpruned beauty?

Possibly; but all summer long, Bardlong never complained. He was there in his faded straw hat, gardening, simply puttering, often accompanied by his wife. The two of them seemed more like guests in an elegant old resort hotel than actual residents. Their dress, for yard work, was absurdly formal — as if Bardlong's many years as a brake-systems businessman had left him with no clothes other than business suits. He wore slightly out-of-style suit trousers, with suspenders, and slightly out-of-style dress shirts — the wide-brimmed straw hat shading his pale, freckled forehead. He was complete with an excessively sporty selection of two-toned shoes.

His wife — in a lawn-party dress and a cream-white Panama with a red silk ribbon around the bun at the back of her nail-gray hair — tapped her cane at bricks in the terrace that might dare to be loose. Bardlong followed her with a tiny, toylike pull-cart of cement and a trowel.

They lunched every midafternoon under a large sun umbrella on their back terrace, the white iron lawn furniture gleaming from an era of hunt breakfasts and champagne brunches following a pampered daughter's wedding.

A visit of grown-up children and less grown-up grandchildren seemed to mark the only interruption to Bardlong's summer. Three days of a dog barking and of balls being tossed about the pool-table symmetry of that yard seemed to upset the Bardlongs for a week following. They anxiously trailed the children around the grounds, trying to mend broken stalks of flowers, spearing on some garden instrument the affront of a gum wrapper, replacing divots dug up by the wild-running dog who could, and had, cut like a halfback through the soft grass.

For a week after this family invasion, the Bardlongs were collapsed on the terrace under their sun umbrella, too tired to tap a single brick or repair a tiny torn arm of ivy ripped from a trellis by a passing child.

“Hey, Raunch,” Kit whispered. “Bardlong takes that shock!”

“Bardlong stops you short!” Ronkers would read off the trucks around town. But never did one of those crude vehicles so much as approach the fresh-painted curb by Bardlong's house. Bardlong was, indeed, retired. And the Ronkerses found it impossible to imagine the man as ever having lived another way. Even when his daily fare had been brake systerns and shock absorbers, the Ronkerses couldn't conceive of Bardlong having taken part.

George once had a daydream of perverse exaggeration. He told Kit he had watched a huge
BARD-LONG STOPS YOU SHORT
! truck dump its entire supply in Bardlong's yard: the truck with its big back-panel doors flung wide open, churning up the lawn and disgorging itself of clanking parts — brake drums and brake shoes — and great oily slicks of brake fluid, rubbery, springing shock absorbers mashing down the flower beds.

“Raunch,” Kit whispered.

“Yup …”

“Were the warts actually
in
her vagina?”

“In it, on it, all around it.

“Seventy-five!
Oh, Raunch, I can't imagine it.”

They lay in bed dappled by the late summer sun, which in the early morning could scarcely penetrate the thick weave of leaves fanned over their window by the black walnut tree.

“You know what I love about lying here?” Ronkers asked his wife. She snuggled up to him.

“Oh no, tell

“Well, it's the
tree
,” he said. “I think my first sexual experience was in a tree house and that's what it's like up here….”

“You and the damn tree,” Kit said. “It might be my
architecture
that makes you like that tree so much. Or even
me,”
she said. “And
that's
a likely story — I can't imagine you doing it in a tree house, frankly — that sounds like something one of your dirty old patients told you.

“Well, actually it was a dirty
young
one.”

“You're awful, Raunch. My God, seventy-five
warts…”

“Quite a lot of surgery for such a spot, too.”

“I
thought you said Tomlinson did it.”

“Well, yes, but I
assisted”

“You don't
normally
do that, do you?”

“Well, no, but this wasn't
normal.”

“You're really awful, Raunch.

“Purely medical interest, professional desire to learn. You use a lot of mineral oil and twenty-five percent podophyllin. The cautery is delicate.

“Turds,” Kit said.

But summer soon ends, and with the students back in town Ronkers was too busy to lie long abed in the mornings. There are a staggering host of urinary-tract infections to be discovered in all corners of the globe, a little-known fringe benefit of the tourist trade; perhaps it is the nation's largest unknown summer import.

A line of students waited to see him each morning, their summer travel ended, their work begun in earnest, their peeing problems growing more severe.

“Doc, I think I picked this up in Izmir.”

“The question is, how much has it gotten around
since?”

“The trouble,” Ronkers told Kit, “is that they all know perfectly well, at the first sign, what it is they've got — and, usually, even from
whom.
But almost all of them spend some time waiting for it to go away — or passing it on, for Christ's sake! — and they don't come to me until they can't
stand
it anymore.”

But Ronkers was very sympathetic to his venereal patients and did not make them feel steeped in sin or wallowing in their just rewards; he said they should not feel guilty for catching anything from absolutely anybody. However, he was tough about insisting that they inform the original hostess — whenever they knew her. “She may not
know
,” Ronkers would say.